Page 138 - Cultural Theory

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••• Foucault: Interpretive Analysis and the Social •••

Many total institutions, most of the time, seem to function merely as storage
dumps for inmates ... but they usually present themselves to the public as ratio-
nal organizations designed consciously, through and through, as effective
machines for producing a few officially avowed and officially approved ends.

(Goffman, 1968: 73)

One fundamental difference between Goffman and Foucault’s interpretations of
institutions would be, however, that whereas Goffman claims that total institutions
are untypical of society as a whole, Foucault’s critique stresses that the carceral ele-
ments of institutional life encapsulates a core feature of social life. One reason for
wanting to study prisons, aside from its prior neglect, was:

the idea of reactivating the project of a ‘genealogy of morals’, one which
worked by tracing the lines of what one might call ‘moral technologies’. In
order to get a better understanding of what is punished and why, I wanted to
ask the question: how does one punish?
(Foucault, 1989: 276)

Foucault never felt totally comfortable with archaeological analysis and felt that dis-
courses did not reveal the irregularities ongoing within social practices (Biggs and
Powell, 2001). As a result he developed his methodology during the course of his
investigations.

Genealogical analysis

Foucault acquired the concept of ‘genealogy’ from the writings of F. Nietzsche.
Genealogy still maintains elements of archaeology including the analysis of state-
ments in the ‘archive’ (Foucault, 1977; 1980; 1982). With genealogy, Foucault
(1977) added a concern with the analysis of power/knowledge which manifests
itself in the ‘history of the present’. As Rose (1984) points out, genealogy concerns
itself with disreputable origins and ‘unpalatable functions’. This can, for example,
be seen in relation to psycho-casework, care management and probation practice
(Biggs and Powell, 1999; 2001; May, 1991; 1994). As Foucault found in his explo-
ration of psychiatric power: ‘Couldn’t the interweaving effects of power and knowl-
edge be grasped with greater certainty in the case of a science as “dubious” as
psychiatry?’ (1980: 109).
Genealogy also establishes itself from archaeology in it approach to discourse.
Whereas archaeology provides a snapshot, a ‘slice’ through the discursive nexus,
genealogy focuses on the processual aspects of the web of discourse – its ongoing
character (ibid). Foucault did attempt to make the difference between them explicit:

If we were to characterise it in two terms, then ‘archaeology’ would be the
appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursiveness, and ‘genealogy’
would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local
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